“What is missing from Testimony is the customary idealistic hero, the one last encountered in Walt Whitman’sLeaves of Grass who doesn’t avert his eyes from suffering and sordidness, but who nevertheless is full of hope for a better future. Testimony is a corrective, an anti-epic.” Charles SimićrecountsCharles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative in the NYRB.

It’s not online but “The Boy Who Had Never Seen The Sea” by newly named Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio appears in this week’s New Yorker. See our recent guest post about publishing Le Clézio.In last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwellwas back, this time talking about “genius.” His guinea pigs were Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer.The headline says it all: “Karl Marx’s book sells as Germany economy sinks.””The _______of________“The fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation has arrived.

One comment:

I wish I could say this made me feel optimistic about the future of book-reading for younger generations, but the study doesn’t seem to exclude books read for school, and a great majority of Americans 16-29 would likely have been required to read multiple books for school assignments. I wonder how many young adults read books of their own volition/for fun regularly, electronically or in print. In my experience with my peers (I’m 24), very few. :(

“[I]t’s important that people begin to understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable.” Claudia Rankine talks to The Guardian about her plans for the Racial Imaginary Institute, a think-tank-cum-gallery that she’s founding with all that MacArthur Genius cash. See also: why Americans love poetry, but not poetry books.